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HomeFAQsMarketing TeamsWhat PLA monitoring info do you provide?

What PLA monitoring info do you provide?

We have the data that demystifies the PLA!

PLAs are the talk of the town for retail search marketers and aren’t going away anytime soon. They are incredibly effective conversion tools but are often misunderstood. While marketers control the content of PLA ads through a data feed, the problem is a lack of visibility into which product is showing for a keyword query.

What We Monitor: We capture and report on all shopping listings that appear in worldwide search results. This includes Product Listing Ads (PLAs) on Google and shopping listings on Yahoo and Bing. We monitor them similarly to paid search ads, with multiple query checks per day. PLA monitoring is included in our SEM package offering and also within  lighthouse-logo-medium.

Why It’s Tricky: PLAs require more intensive monitoring than other shopping listings. They change with each new search query (like paid search ads) which is different than shopping engine listings that change at a pace similar to organic listings.

PLA Stats We Capture

  • Percent of keywords containing PLAs:  Some keywords do not have PLAs, while others do.  The percent of keywords that contain PLAs can vary per vertical.
  • Number of ad units per keyword:  PLAs can show up as small as 2-unit boxes or as large as 6 or 8-unit boxes.
  • Cross-media reporting: SEM, SEO, and PLA ad share, and the intersection of how often you appear on each ad unit.
  • Seller Statistics: Rank, Share of Voice, frequency (i.e. % of the time a seller shows up in product listing ads), seller ratings and reviews, & list of all products promoted by the seller
  • Product Statistics:  Price promoted by each seller, average price for a product, price range (low to high), & ad copy

Best Practices With PLA Stats

  • Determine if your vertical is a heavy user of PLAs and you need to be there (agencies can use to recommend PLAs to clients)
  • Determine if PLAs are pushing down your text ads, causing lower CTRs
  • Determine if the products you want to display are actually displaying
  • Determine if your product’s price is displaying within the range of prices in the PLA unit (too high is a big no-no for CTR)
  • Determine if your product’s images look as good as the other images in the PLA

Other PLA Resources

Posted in: Marketing Teams, Monitoring & Capturing Data, Why Work With The Search Monitor